@B_Eichengreen provides important background, or just call it speculation on his notion that there is a coming conflict between Merkel’s fiscal Conservatism and Macron’s ‘Jupertarian Politics’. Two politicians suffering from galloping hubris, to put it almost diplomatically.

As the august Financial Times has noted, Macron’s plummeting poll numbers, and that near 37% of spoiled, blank and otherwise uncountable ballots, in the final vote . And the Le Pen and Mélenchon coteries of dissidents, will have what effect on the hermetic speculations of Mr. Eichengreen’s technocratic chatter? That first appeared at the home of respectable bourgeois policy opinion, meaning a publication that specializes in EU apologetics , Project Syndicate, by bought and paid for public intellectuals. What better credential to present to the reader than this? ( …formerly Senior Policy Adviser at the International Monetary Fund. )

Four time defaulter Germany, in the person of Merkel, is addicted to the utterly false narrative of German fiscal probity. Gillian Tett provides the necessary background to that specious mythology :